These white Roses are no candidates (though candidate) at our severe competitive examinations; but they are delightful members of our Rose community, beautiful in themselves, and enhancing greatly the beauty of others. We must not be fastidious because they are of medium size in some cases and not purely white in others, remembering that their colours are still the most rare of all, and that their flowers are plenteous always. They are easily cultivated on the Brier, the Manetti, or their own roots.

* "Albion insula sic dicta ab albis rupibus quas mare alluit, vel ob rosas albas, quibus abundat." - Hist. Nat., iv. 16.

In place of the dark crimson, which we called the Damask, Rose, the amateur is advised to substitute Boule de Nanteuil, D'Aguesseau, Frederic II., General Jacqueminot (hybrid China), Grandissima, Ohl, Paul Ricaut, Shakespeare, and Triomphe de Jaussens. These are noble Roses, of healthful growth, fine foliage, and ample bloom. They make grand heads on standards of medium height, moderately pruned, and immoderately manured. It seems to me but a few summers since these were our finest show varieties, the belles of our Court balls; and now, seen in the zenith of their glory upon the trees, they are not to be surpassed in size or richness of colour, but they have not the vellers, becoming restless in hot summer nights, and throwing off their perfect symmetry of our more recent Roses, and they are but poor tra-petals, as feverish dreamers their counterpane and blanket and sheet.

Intermediate between these light and dark varieties - neither blondes nor brunettes, Minnas nor Brendas - I commend for the general ornamentation of the Rosary, and from the summer Roses advertised in our lists, all the Pillar Roses described at p. 150, especially Blairii 2, Charles Lawson, Coupe d'Hebe, Juno, and Paul Perras. Low on bushes, high on poles, or midway on the brier, these Roses are alike effective, charming. To these I would add La Ville de Bruxelles, having bright pink flowers of a compact form, and so complete my selection of summer Roses for the general collection.

"Wait a moment," it may be said; "do you mean to tell us that such Roses as Blairii 2 and Charles Lawson are only garden Roses, and not good enough for exhibition?" Yes, I do mean to tell you that it is with these Roses as with those which we discussed before them. If you could bring the British public to them, they would be rewarded with the highest distinctions, but the process of conveying them to the British public takes the exquisite freshness from Charles Lawson's beauty, and too often produces in the junior Miss Blair a transition from the blushing gracefulness of girlhood into the rubicund stoutness of middle age. Again and again, charmed by their loveliness overnight, I have given them a place in my boxes: as often I have been obliged to confess that the impulse of the evening did not satisfy the morning's reflection. On this subject I shall have more to say; meanwhile let us sniff The Sweet-Brier; and let no rosarian lightly esteem this simple but gracious gift. "You are a magnificent swell," said a dingy little brown bird, by name Philomela, to a cock-pheasant strutting and crowing in the woods, "but your music is an awful failure." So may the Sweet-Brier, with no flowers to speak of, remind many a gaudy-neighbour that fine feathers do not constitute a perfect bird, and that men have other senses as well as that of sight to please.

Not even among the Roses shall we find a more delicious perfume. The Thurifer wears a sombre cassock, but no sweeter incense rises heavenward.

In one of our most beautiful midland gardens there is a circular space hedged in, and filled exclusively with sweet-scented leaves and flowers. There grows the Eglantine and the Honeysuckle, the Gilliflower, the Clove, and Stock, Sweet Peas and Musk, Jasmine and Geranium, Verbena and Heliotrope - but the Eglantine to me, when I passed through "The Sweet Garden," as it is called, just after a soft May shower, had the sweetest scent of them all. It is an idea very gracefully imagined and happily realised, but suggested by, and still suggesting, sorrowful sympathies, for the owner of that garden is blind.

The Austrian Brier is a Sweet-Brier also; and though not so fragrant in its foliage as our own old favourite, it brings us, in the variety called Persian Yellow, a satisfactory recompense - namely, flowers of deepest, brightest yellow, prettily shaped, but small. This Rose is almost the earliest to tell us that summer is at hand, first by unfolding its sweet leaves, of a most vivid refreshing green, and then by its golden blooms. It grows well on the brier, but is preferable, when size is an object, on its own roots, from which it soon sends vigorous suckers, and so forms a large bush. In pruning, the amateur will do well to remember the warning "Ah me! what perils do environ The man who meddles with cold iron; " seeing that if he is too vivacious with his knife, he will inevitably destroy all hopes of bloom. Let him remove weakly wood altogether, and then only shorten by a few inches the more vigorous shoots.

We will pass now from garden Roses, which bloom but once, to those which are called Perpetual, "biferique rosaria Psesti." What a change in my garden since, forty years ago, the "old Monthly" and another member of the same family, but of a deep crimson complexion (Fabvier, most probably), were the only Roses of continuous bloom! and now among 3000 trees not more than 30 are summer Roses. All the rest Perpetuals, or rather, for I must repeat it, called Perpetuals by courtesy, seeing that many of them score 0 in their second innings, and but few resume their former glory in autumn. They are, nevertheless, as superior for the most part in endurance as in quality to the summer Roses, and they supply an abundance of the most beautiful varieties both for the purpose now under consideration, the general ornamentation of the rosary, and for public exhibition.